Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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It’s going to SNOW this weekend???

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I was just looking at my desktop weather widget and it says that we’re expecting snow/rain all day Saturday, Sunday and Monday! Ahhhh! Scary forecast! More than likely if it snows it will melt pretty much right away, but soon enough the snow will be here to stay.

Speaking of snow and bad weather … Did you know that there’s supposed to be a shortage of snow tires here in Canada this year? Why? Well, the province of Quebec is enforcing a new law that requires all vehicles in the province to have snow tires and that’s created a shortage in the rest of the Canadian provinces that need them. I wonder if there will be an increase in the sale of tire chains due to the winter tire shortage in some areas of Canada where winter tires are truly necessary?

Here in Toronto it’s not really a MUST to have snow tires. As I said earlier it snows here and then it often melts away fairly quickly … well, except for winters like last year! I think most people in Toronto use All Season tires on their cars, but Chris was talking about getting snow tires this year. One way or another we’ll need to get new tires soon – All Season or Winter – as our tires are kind of old and starting to go bald. Definitely no where close to winter safe.

I guess we’d better start looking for new tires soon (and the funds to pay for them!).

Do you change over to winter tires in the winter time?





A perfect gift for someone recovering from surgery in the hospital?

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Chris was just talking to our friend J. She lives out of town with her husband, but in three weeks she’ll be in Toronto for open heart surgery! She’s had some heart problems for a while and it’s time to get them fixed before her problem gets worse.

When we talked to J’s husband earlier in the week we invited him to stay with us while his wife is in the hospital. He hadn’t even thought of where he might stay or even how much parking would cost if he spent most of the day in the hospital at his wife’s bedside.

We aren’t sure how long our friend will be in the hospital, but we do know she’ll be sedated and intubated for a few days after the surgery so that she can recover from the surgery better, so I expect she’ll be in the hospital for one to two weeks or longer. Can you imagine how much it would cost her husband to stay in a hotel and to park his car at the hospital on and off for two weeks? Or to drive back and forth from where they live (two hours from Toronto)? Yeah, so he’ll save a LOT of money if he stays with us!

Anyway … I know what being in the hospital is like. It’s noisy, it’s boring and if you aren’t feeling well it’s even worse. It’s nice to have friends and relatives drop in, but that can make you even more tired. So I was trying to think of something that we could get our friend so that she could pass the time in the hospital.

I just visited Buy.com to check out their weekly sale page, but I didn’t find anything that might be appropriate for someone recovering from surgery in the hospital. Then I had a great idea. Why not get her a portable DVD player? I was looking at the Philips DCP750 and it looks like it has all the features she’d need.

Now I just have to secretly find out if she has a portable DVD player and if she’d be allowed to use it while she’s in the hospital. I’m pretty sure that once she’s out of Intensive Care she’d probably be allowed to use it. It would certainly be a great way to pass the time and both she and her husband could spend time watching movies on the DVD player.

Does that sound like a good gift for someone spending a couple of weeks in the hospital? Any other ideas?

We’re probably skipping Halloween this year

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I still haven’t decided if we’ll be celebrating Halloween at our home tomorrow evening. Most years we decorate the front of the house with Halloween figures and some of that fake spider web stuff, but we didn’t do that this year.

Why? Well .. we’ve never had a dog at Halloween and Midnight barks and jumps around like crazy whenever anyone comes to our porch (mailman) or knocks on the door so I can just imagine how she’ll react when little kids all dressed in their cute Halloween costumes start coming to the door in droves.

I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be scared by the kids in costume, she loves kids, but I’ll bet she’d scare them with her barking and jumping. Plus it will be very tiring for us telling her to stop barking for hours on end and holding on to her collar every time we open the door!

So yeah … we’re thinking of just not participating in Halloween this year. If we don’t, I’ll lock our outside screen door so kids can’t come into the enclosed porch and I’ll close our decorative heavy curtains (that I rarely close) so the house will appear dark.

I really enjoy participating in Halloween and or holding Halloween parties, but with Midnight only being a little over a year old and rather hyper I think it will be easier to just skip Halloween this year.

Do you participate in Halloween every year – handing out candy to the kids or have you skipped it on occasion for some reason?

This neighborhood’s getting noisy!

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Earlier today I was startled by a really loud sound. I thought that there had been an accident in front of the house, but when I looked outside I couldn’t see anything unusual. It wasn’t until I took the dog outside to do her business that I noticed a huge bulldozer parked on the side street near our house. I guess a material handling company must have dropped it off earlier – probably when I heard the loud noise.

I’ll be that it’s going to be really noisy around here tomorrow when that big machine starts doing whatever it’s here to do. I hope they aren’t going to dig up the sidewalks again. The last two times they’ve done that (in the 7 years we’ve lived here!) it was for upgrades to the water pipe and gas pipe systems.

Yesterday afternoon I heard a really loud noise too. I happened just as I was looking outside, noticing how windy it was and that one of our neighbors garbage cans was on the sidewalk ready to roll out into the road if it got any windier and Boom … there was a loud crash and a rolling thunder type noise in our driveway.

It turned out to have been caused by our neighbors large recycling container falling over in the wind and rolling halfway down the driveway. Man those things can make some noise when they fall over!

The driveway is like a wind tunnel in the winter. I sure hope that that noise isn’t going to be a daily occurrence!

Have you been startled by any loud noises in your neighborhood lately? If you are having wind like we are having (and we had snow flurries yesterday and today too! Sob!) I’ll bet you’ve heard some odd noises.

My laptop is getting slower and slower

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I’m starting to get really frustrated when I’m using my laptop. It’s so slow!

When I first start up the laptop it takes forever for the browser and my email program to start up. Once they are loaded it’s not too bad, but the computer is a lot slower than my desktop computer and it’s slower than it used to be even a few months ago.

I think I’m going to have to go over everything and start deleting things I don’t use and maybe move documents and photos over to my other computer or to my portable hard drive. I haven’t defragged the computer for a while either, maybe defragging will help.

For those of you that have both a laptop and desktop computer do you find that your desktop computer is faster?

Update- I forgot to mention that yes I use an anti-virus program (Norton Anti-Virus) and it runs a complete scan of my system once a week. I just ran it last night after posting this, so it’s unlikely that this problem is being caused by a virus.

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